The present invention relates generally to the field of data storage hardware and software, and more particularly to dynamically modifying configuration information related to data mirroring by a storage system.
Disaster recovery systems typically address two types of failures, a sudden catastrophic failure at a single point in time or data loss over a period of time. To assist in recovery of data updates, a copy of data may be available from a remote location. Data mirroring is one copy technology for maintaining remote copies of data (e.g., write activity) at a secondary site or secondary storage system. Data mirroring can occur asynchronously to minimize write delays within a storage system of the primary computing system. To isolate and control the mirroring of data to a secondary storage system, each client (e.g., application owner) utilizing a primary computing system and mirroring data to the secondary storage system has one or more logical partitions (LPARs) provisioned within the secondary storage system to support the data mirroring for applications that generate or modify the data of a client.
In this manner, nearly identical copies of changes to written data are maintained in volume pairs between the primary computing system and the secondary storage system. The data stored on the secondary storage system differs from the data within the primary computing system by a time differential equal to or less than a recover point objective (RPO) value that is dictated by the owner of the application. A client may configure multiple logical storage subsystems (LSSs) within the primary computing system to store write activity generated by an application. Each LSS includes a hardware buffer to maintain data for mirroring; as such, each LSS has a designated communication channel to a logical partition (LPAR) of the secondary storage system utilized for data mirroring. Similarly, each communication channel to the LPAR is assigned a designated communication task, such as a base reader task. A communication task may not utilize the entire bandwidth of a communication channel so additional reader task aliases are created to increase the bandwidth available for mirroring data between the primary computing system and the secondary storage system.